Death by Thousand Cuts, Prevented

We’ve often told customers (and anyone else who would listen) that our projects tend to cost less, finish faster, and stall less often than the projects with other vendors. And they go to production more often than the other vendors too – it isn’t a success in our book unless it does go to production. We’ve often told software vendors like IBM that our projects also reduce strain on their support and product teams because we know the product and avoid steering projects into defects and potholes.

In short, we submit dramatically fewer PMRs than other vendors:10x to 100x fewer PMRs per deployment. Most of our deployments have zero or 1 PMR submitted during the deployment.

As a result, BP3 projects don’t get stuck waiting on product fixes or responses from scarce product support and product engineering resources. Our own team is experienced at *not* blaming the vendor, and we have our own internal support team in BP Labs to support our customers and projects teams out in the field, speeding up response times and leveraging the collected wisdom of all of our implementation efforts.

Of course, this is hardly surprising to any businesses who use Macs. We’ve been telling Windows fans for years about this incredible IT cost advantage – not to mention the productivity advantage. But now we have IBM actually releasing the data, and it is staggeringly in favor of Apple’s Macs. IBM’s Previn:

“Every Mac that we buy is making and saving IBM money”

This is completely in line with our own experience at BP3. I’ve never had to help someone install printer drivers on a Mac, but on most of our PC’s, every time someone needed to print there were problems. There are a few die-hard Windows users, and hard-core Linux users, and they’re fine with the expectation that they’re going to have to be power users to make it work here.

The article made me think about the impact BP3 has on a customer’s experience with BPM. It isn’t that we’re perfect, but we do the best job of navigating all the barriers to success. We’re seeing data that indicates that other vendors submit 10x the number of PMRs (support requests) to IBM that BP3 does on parallel project efforts. Sometimes quite a bit more than 10x. The BP3 experience means a smoother project delivery, fewer delays waiting on product fixes, and an organization set up to help customers succeed.

At BP3, one thing we take pride in is being a great partner to our customer as well as software vendors we work with. We are often implementing projects in parallel with other BPM services firms, including software vendors, big IT shops, staffing firms, and other boutique firms. As a result, we have pretty good visibility into how we perform compared to these other firms.

It is likely that IBM doesn’t even know that we’re saving them money every time we run the implementation project or start working with a new BP Labs customer. But the word is getting out, via our customers, and word of mouth – and now on this blog post. Makes me proud of what we’re doing for our customers, and for the ecosystem.